The Healer's War
by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough[ Fantasy ]
Although perhaps best-known for her lightly humorous fantasies and for her collaborations with Anne McCaffrey on the Petaybee series and the Acorna series, Elizabeth Anne Scarborough has also written Healer’s War, a classic novel of the Vietnam War, enriched with a magical, mystical twist, which won the 1989 Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1988. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called it “A brutal and beautiful book.”
Scarborough herself was a nurse in Vietnam during the war and she draws on her own personal experiences to create the central character, Lt. Kitty McCulley. McCulley, a young and inexperienced nurse tossed into a stressful and chaotic situation, is having a difficult time reconciling her duty to help and heal with the indifference and overt racism of some of her colleagues and with the horrendously damaged soldiers and Vietnamese civilians whom she encounters during her service at the China Beach medical facilities.
She is unexpectedly helped by the mysterious and inexplicable properties of an amulet, given to her by one of her patients, an elderly, dying Vietnamese holy man, which allows her to see other people’s “auras” and to understand more about them as a result. This eventually leads to a strange, almost surrealistic journey through the jungle, accompanied by a one-legged boy and a battle-seasoned but crazed soldier and, by the end of the journey, McCulley has found herself and a way to live and survive through the madness and destruction.
Prologue
The nightmares have lost some of their power by now. I can haul myself out of one almost at will, knowing that the sweat-soaked sheet under me is not wet jungle floor, that the pressure against my back is not the barrel of an enemy rifle or a terribly wounded Vietnamese but my sleeping cat. When someone in a suit or a uniform frowns at me, it doesn't always make me feel as if the skin over my spinal column were being chewed away by pointed teeth. Sometimes I can just shrug, and recognize the authority in question as an uptight asshole with no legitimate power over me--none that counts, that is, nothing life-threatening.
Still, most of the time, I retain the feeling that it's the nightmares that are real and my life here and now that is a dream, the same dream I dreamed in the hospital, in the jungle, in the Vietcong tunnels. I'm always afraid that someday I'll be dragged out of this dream, back to Nam, to a war that goes on and on for real in the same way it replays itself in my memory.
"That is what stops your power, Mao," Nguyen Bhu tells me. "You cannot provide a clear path for the amulet's power until your own mind is clear. When you turn your face from your fear, that fear bloats with the power you give it. Look it in the eye, and it will diminish into something that is part of your life, part of your memory, something that belongs to you rather than controls you."
Nguyen Bhu sweeps the floor at his cousin's grocery store. Charlie says he's a former Cao Dai priest, a mystic like old Xe, and the wisest man to escape from Vietnam. He is sixty and looks ninety, has lost three fingers from his right hand, has more sense and is far less expensive than a psychiatrist whose lifelong concern has been to avoid obesity rather than starvation.
And most important, Nguyen Bhu knows what I have to say, and insists that it is not too much to ask people to believe and forgive. Charlie knows part of it, but he has his own nightmares to chase. Of the others who know, I keep hoping that at least one or two survived, and that someday I might see and recognize them among the refugees. One hope I have in writing this is that maybe they will read it or hear of it and find me, and we can heal together.
